Aisle.One

I’ve been search­ing for months and months now for a sin­gle copy of Die Neue Gesellschaft, a polit­i­cal mag­a­zine that was art directed by Hel­mut Schmid, but they seem to be extremely rare. I was able to get in touch with some peo­ple who curate Schmid’s work and they sent over some orig­i­nal scans of the cov­ers which are just gor­geous. I’m try­ing to get them to send over more but they haven’t replied to me in a while. In the mean­time drool over these. This design was first used in 1974 with issue #7 and remained in use until 1981.

Hon­estly, I would pay good money for a com­plete set of these. I’m so obsessed with them.

10 Comments on "Die Neue Gesellschaft"

Thanks for the scans Anto­nio. Hel­mut Schmid is a really inter­est­ing designer, most notably with these mag­a­zine cov­ers. I’m try­ing to get my hands on a copy of ‘Design is Atti­tude’, and have so far only been lucky enough to read ‘Typog­ra­phy Today’ (with con­tri­bu­tions by Crouwel, Wein­gart and Grig­nani) a beau­ti­ful book, but not nec­es­sar­ily a show­case of Schmid.

sec­ond: yes, the design is very clean and func­tional. okay, that’s cool, but that very, very typ­i­cal for print­ings in that time in ger­many — heav­ily affected by “die neue typogra­phie” by jan tschi­chold, bauhaus and later by “Ulm Design School”. so, it’s not very outstanding…

no, it isn’t. hel­mut schmidt was co-editor of this “mag­a­zine”, that’s true, but he wasn’t the designer. by the way: it was a polit­i­cal pub­li­ca­tion; pub­lished by “friedrich ebert stiftung”

and: it’s not out­stand­ing cause is not out­stand­ing. sim­ple like that. there had been lots of pub­li­ca­tions like this one througout the six­ties and early sev­en­ties — over here ger­many — with that kind of design. so, it is not very out­stand­ing in the sense of: it’s not very rare… they all refer to tschi­chold, bauhaus & ulm

First off the per­son I’m refer­ring to is called Hel­mut SCHMID, not SCHMIDT. Hel­mut Schmid is in fact a desiger and he did design this cover. There is a site about him here that cel­e­brates his work, which includes this cover. There is also a book about him and I even exchanged email with the peo­ple who curate his work and they con­firmed that Schmid designed this cover.

hm, you are right.. my fault — but schmid and schmidt… it’s late over here…

stud­ied under Emil Ruder… but: he is not that famous in ger­many. and the design isn’t that out­stand­ing… is so typ­i­cal for that period in ger­man design… but maybe an exhi­bi­tion in a design school in düs­sel­dorf — the city where i live — chanced that…